March 25, 2024

On Saturday, Ukraine’s official Twitter account put out a call for financial aid as Russia pummeled it with artillery for the third day in a row. “Stand with the people of Ukraine,” it wrote. “Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT,” followed by wallet addresses where the country could accept people’s digital coins.

Naturally, a Twitter call for crypto aroused skepticism. Hours after Ukraine’s tweet, major blockchain network Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin took to the social platform urging people not to send their crypto to the addresses listed without verification. “There have been *a lot* of hacks alongside this invasion,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “This info environment is as hostile as it gets, exercise extreme vigilance.”

Warnings like these, however, were dwarfed by the number of tweets in which people pledged their crypto to the embattled country. (Some of them may have been sent by bots, judging by the slew of numbers at the end of their Twitter handles, but many were real people or groups eager to donate.)

Watching this unfold in real time on…

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